


Cold Regret

by subversivegrrl



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 11:36:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subversivegrrl/pseuds/subversivegrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A snippet based on the promo for S4x10, "Inmates."  Daryl just doesn't have it in him to go on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Regret

He stared into the fire, trying to find something inside him, some reason why he should take one more step beyond this point. Eat another mouthful. Lie down and sleep. Keep a weapon close at hand. And he came up empty every time. Big hollow echoing empty, full of nothing. By day, Beth kept at him - banging on about where and when and who and how. Nighttime, though, fuck it. Nothing to distract him from how abso-fucking-lutely pointless it all was. They were going to die no matter what - might as well get it over with and save all the agonizing, the relentless running and scraping by, the pain of watching someone else you…

Right now it was possible that he wanted to die more than he'd ever wanted just about anything. But he couldn't do it. Some piece of him couldn't stand the thought of just giving up. He looked at that knife and thought about the keen edge of it, how it wouldn't even hurt to lay his arm open and bleed his life away. He even figured out how easy it would be, if it came to that, to wedge the butt of that blade into the crotch of a tree and run it into his own eyeball, make sure he wasn't coming back. But it wasn't about a clean death. It wasn't about death at all. It was just about needing to quiet the great screaming pit inside him where he'd let them all come to live. And now they were gone, all but one. He'd been an idiot, to ever think it could be different. People always left you behind, somehow. And he wasn't even sure if it had done him any good at all to hold back from the few pleasures that had been right in front of him. Would it be worse now, to have stepped over that line and taken her into his bed, to have held her in his arms and then had her ripped from him? or to be left with the cold regret of having pushed away what sparse comfort they might have taken in each other for the short time they'd been granted?

He'd never know, and that was the hell of it. He'd never know.


End file.
